Rajendra Pachauri, a septuagenarian economist and engineer from India who has chaired the IPCC since 2002. He oversees a small staff of about 10 people. Those staff help coordinate working groups, each of which can involve up to 800 scientists. Sound tedious? It probably is.

But we’re not convinced that Pachauri spends all of his time during IPCC meetings thinking about climate science. He is the author of Return to Almora, a sultry 2010 novel loaded with group-sex scenes and other such non-scientific escapades. Here are a couple of tantalizing quotes from said novel:

“He was excited by the sight of her heaving breasts, as she breathed in and out deeply.”

“Afterwards she held him close. ‘Sandy, I’ve learned something for the first time today. You are absolutely superb after meditation. Why don’t we make love every time immediately after you have meditated?’.”

John Upton, at Grist, is mistaken. I’ve read Pachauri’s entire novel. There’s lots of sexualized content: masturbation, anal rape, six guys taking turns with one willing gal, lots of descriptions of female breasts, etc. In a book that Pachauri insists is “400 pages all about spirituality.”

However, this is not a novel “loaded with group-sex scenes.” I can’t recall a single one. See my five-part coverage of Pachauri’s book here:

Unwarranted Ad Hom attack. There’s plenty of flaws in the man’s relevant body of work. I don’t think you can blame a man in his 70s for getting a bit lonely and imaginative. I certainly don’t want this being recaste as yet another “backward religious fundamentalists VS science” debate. That’s playing right into their hands.
That being said…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R2zvE615dM